On a standard morning commute, Ben was swiping through Tinder. He came across a woman who he describes as “ten out of ten”.
“She had a dog, seemed to like a drink and had a ‘girl next door’ vibe about her,” he tells me. “To my surprise, we instantly matched. I opened with a comment about how cute her doggo was and asked the generic questions about how old he was and what was his name.”
Ben – a pseudonym – tells me he then spent the rest of the day constantly speaking to this woman. That night, she asked him to follow her on Instagram – he didn’t think much of it. “I followed her and gave her a couple of likes and then she was quiet for the rest of the evening,” he tells me. “The next day I messaged her but didn’t get a response.”
Ben says that this didn’t initially seem like a problem: people suddenly become busy sometimes and don’t always message back within a couple of hours. “But later that day I was showing a colleague a photo of her on Instagram when it suddenly dawned on me,” he says. “All the likes on her photos were from guys and there wasn’t any public interaction with those commenting on her photos. We never did talk again.”
Ben is a casualty of an increasingly universal tactic popular on Tinder. And a cursory Twitter search shows that Ben is not alone. “Girls on Tinder checklist... ‘Follow me on Instagram, I’m not on here that much’” wrote one user. “Tinder is just not the same as it was years ago. Girls just use it as a place to plug their Instagram,” posted another. “I’m very new to Tinder and from my understanding girls just want me to follow them on Instagram,” one person tweeted. “Hot girls on Tinder... just want Instagram follows,” wrote another.
All of these men are describing the mostly female tactic of using Tinder purely to build up a social media following – a trend that they say has become unavoidable on the app over the last several months. “I notice it on eight out of ten accounts,” Liam, a 26-year-old from Wales, tells me. “I’ve noticed more and more that I’m matching with girls who just have their Instagram username in their bio,” Ben agrees. “That’s it... nothing else.”
For many male users, it is making Tinder an even greater minefield that it already was – in many cases feeling like they have to read heavily into a person’s profile to figure out what they are really on the app for. But while many men on Tinder think they’re well aware of the signs, women are still growing enormous follower-counts off the back of men easily taking the bait.
Madison, a 23-year-old living in Utah, is one of these women. She spent months on Tinder trying to find someone she clicked with to no avail. “Tinder to me isn’t really good for anything else,” she says. “I don’t see a lot of people I like.”
“So I re-downloaded Tinder to make it work for me another way,” she tells me. “Now I just use it to get people to follow my Instagram... and gain about 20 followers a day.”
Kate, 23, based in Essex, also uses dating apps for this sole purpose (she asked to remain anonymous because she feels the tactic is “still a cringe thing to do”). She tells me she’s been doing it for two years now, having never actually used Tinder for its original purpose.
“I downloaded Tinder while in a relationship,” she says. “I’m an extremely loyal person and my boyfriends have understood it’s simply to get followers, not to cheat on them. It’s really never been an issue for me in a relationship, as they know I wouldn’t use it to talk to anyone.”
Rather than matching with lots of people, Kate tells me she tends to open up Tinder when she’s in a new location to put herself “on the map”.
“I just swipe ‘no’ on as many profiles as I can for a few minutes and I instantly start to notice an influx of followers on Instagram,” she says. In the UK, she usually gains about five followers a day through this method, but when she goes abroad, “It can be up to 100 new follows a day.”
For many users, Instagram’s constantly changing algorithm is what’s driving them to use Tinder for follower growth – thirst traps or well-lit shots on a dating app will get seen by more people than Instagram’s algorithm will allow. “It may seem weird and desperate, but it’s not to me,” Kate says. “My Instagram has given me loads of opportunities and work.
“It’s so hard to organically grow a following anymore,” she adds. “Literally any way you can get a bit of following helps.”
While this trend does tend to focus on growing Instagram followings, some people use it to boost their clout on other platforms. Alex, a 27-year-old based in Glasgow, tells me that they tend to focus on growing their following on Twitter rather than Instagram and use Tinder on a near-daily basis to draw more people to their account.
“I only really use Tinder these days, though I have previously used OkCupid and do have Feeld,” they tell me. “My Tinder bio currently says, ‘Drinks welcome / mutual tweet faving also welcome’ and has said some variant of that for a long time.”
Alex tells me that, “Generally, people who are very ‘online’ pick up on it” and that, more often than not, that mutual understanding will result in a fresh new follow. But while Alex does admit that they are mostly just looking for extra followers, they do say, “There's a few people I've matched with who turned into mutual faves.”
While beneficial to follower-counts, this growth tactic does have its downsides for those who use it. “I get a lot of weird message requests and comments from guys I didn’t match with,” Madison tells me, with her Instagram so prominently in her profile. “Usually they’re pretty funny, but I do get some unsolicited nudes,” she says, “They wouldn’t have been able to send them if my Instagram wasn’t in my Tinder profile.”
The trend is now a mainstream meme – the “Tinder girl checklist” format almost always featuring, “Not on here much, follow on Instagram.” But, despite the jokes, it does deliver an emotional impact, leaving many men heartbroken and betrayed by the emotional investment.
“I felt ugly, useless and used,” Ben tells of when he realised he was being ghosted by his Tinder match. “It’s the ultimate tease,” he says. “You match with someone, think it might go somewhere, then boom – the carpet is pulled away.”
“[It’s a] time waste,” Liam tells me. “It’s annoying that dating sites haven’t bothered to vet the people who join.”
“Tinder would be much better if it banned people from advertising their Instagram.”
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